In person icon Feminist Analysis and Governmentality: Synergies and Tensions

Abstract

This panel brings together papers that explore whether and how feminist analysis and an analytic of governmentality can be brought into productive dialogue within critical, policy-interested scholarship. These two research approaches share a broad understanding of politics and power as complex, multi-faceted and practiced within and across diverse sites; they also have each generated a significant literature exploring diverse aspects of neoliberalism. At the same time, there are tensions between them including both the suspicion of “emancipatory projects” visible in some parts of the governmentality literature as well as concerns among feminist scholars that governmentality scholarship is insufficiently attentive to political agency and resistive practices. Working from the premise that each approach has something valuable and distinctive to offer critical scholars interested in gender and neoliberalism, each of the papers explores – theoretically, conceptually and/or empirically – some aspect of intersection between them, whether as dialogue, collision, or struggle.